I've always been a programmer. Then I learned enough about shipping software products at Convex and Dazel, and then global collaboration at W3C. I have always respected the people who keep the servers running—the W3C systems team rocks!—and now I'm learning a bit of that stuff too.

I mostly taught myself to program as a teenager. Then I worked at Convex, developing software supercomputers. It was a mature engineering organization; a great place to learn about shipping software products. Then I helped set up the engineering organization at a startup company, Dazel. Between these jobs, I learned the difference between a program and a product: a program works for the one who wrote it, while a product works for users. For the same set of features, developing a product is about a hundred times as much work as developing a program.

My job at W3C struck a nice balance between research and development for a good long while. In my short stint at Science Commons, I wrote "writing software to support research" in a status update, and I have hung on to that since. That's pretty much what I do at KUMC.

We're building a data repository for clinical researchers. It has just a handful of users now, but we're gearing up for more. So it's time to think about server operations. I did a little bit of system administration at W3C... it was something of a tradition that each new hire on the technical staff played that role... but eventually we grew up and hired real system administrators. Since then I have managed to avoid responsibility for server operations.

Cleaning up my contacts with batch edits in the Google Contacts Data API

The Blizzard of Oz snow day gave me a chance to get my taxes done yesterday, and today I used the time to scratch a long-standing itch to clean up my contacts, which have been a bit of a mess since I merged two sources into one.

When I got my first android phone, a G1, I used the Google Contacts Data API to write hipg.py for migrating my sidekick/hiptop contacts to gmail contacts. Then I grew disappointed with the G1 and went back to the sidekick. And then Microsoft bought Danger and lost everybody's sidekick contacts for a week or so. They restored some of the data, but all my street addresses were gone. I had back-ups, of course; I know better than to completely trust any cloud provider. But I hadn't written code to restore from my back-ups. So I lived without street addresses in my phone for a while.

Then I got another android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant. I migrated the sidekick contacts again, and then, to get the street addresses, I imported the contacts from the G1 days. Google's merge tools cleaned things up to a tolerable level, but they left 2 issues:

Duplicate phone numbers like:

+1-212-555-1212

212-555-1212

Duplicated notes like:
alllinestogether

all
lines
like they should be

I fixed a few of these by hand, but knowing that I could get the computer to do them all in batch has been itching at me for a while.

It took just a few hours and a couple hundred lines of python to scratch that itch today with contact_fix.py.

... during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this.

Since I was born in the late '60s, that seemed perfectly reasonable to me, as he went on to explain:

you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Indeed, I have spent the bulk of my career leading development of open web standards and writing a little open source software; that is: on a shift to participatory media and free culture. But I spend plenty of leisure time on movies, handing ammunition to the old guard with every ticket.

... if extraterrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s Paradox.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Lessig's Free Culture as I commute. The tl;dr version, from his OSCON 2002 talk, is:

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.

Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.

Ours is less and less a free society.

If you haven't at least watched the slides+audio of that talk, stop reading this now and do it. Then let's hope that Jan 1 2011 is the low point in this media aberration.

I hesitate to call it a resolution, but maybe this year I'll make some progress toward the example that Aaron Swartz set back when the Creative Commons licenses were launched in December 2002:

when I go to a movie, I donate money in the amount I spent to the EFF.

The four students who were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom - which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion - received a fine of a mere $750 million. And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering. Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor's negligently butchering a patient?

Lord of War (2005) came to the top of my Netflix queue this week; it has been on my various to-do lists since February 2008 when my brother-in-law recommended it to me during my trip to New York. It's not the feel-good-movie-of-the-year, but it's got some meaty food for thought:

Nicolas Cage once again plays the amoral main character and for most of the movie, we see through his rationalizations and we can see what's coming to him. We're right there with his wife when she says that while she failed at a lot of things, she'll never go so low as he has.

But then-zing!-we learn that we, as U.S. citizens, are party to what he does, as it's a byproduct of U.S. foreign policy.

And it's not just the U.S.:

A brief postscript notes that, while private arms dealers do conduct a lot of business, the five largest arms exporters – the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China – are also the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.Lord of War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My new job is much more on the maker's schedule than the manager's schedule. Work at W3C basically consisted of preparing for and participating in several meetings a day with people all over the planet. Now I'm mostly coding away in my cube, and the little reminder icon at the top of my screen is not enough to break me out of it. (I'm trained to be interrupted by the buzz of my mobile phone, but sync between the enterprise calendar and android unreliable. Sigh.) Having people physically grab me means I don't miss the meeting, but it doesn't give me a chance to properly context switch.

I don't use a laptop (mostly by choice) so access to the Web depends on either pre-filling a paper cache (printing stuff out) or using the pc/projector in the meeting room. The latter is often more disruptive to the meeting than it's worth.

Fortunately, somebody else had printed the web page that I had prepared for today's meeting. And the group leader uses a laptop, so we had two copies.

Part of my preparation for the meeting was to question whether we needed it at all, having recently read Tantek's thoughts on meetings. I thought the technical issues were pretty straightforward and we should just let the developer get on with it and deal with problems as they came up. But it turns out that some of my understanding of the requirements was wrong, and even in the parts that were right, brainstorming led to solutions that were better than the approach I expected development to take.

Meeting discipline is important. My approach to the risks was finely honed over a decade of remote work, but now that we can get together in the same room without getting on airplanes, I'm learning it all over again.

Our home phone service is provided by a VoIP provider, ViaTalk. I have a VoIP client, sipdroid, on my smart phone. When the phone rings and caller-id shows a call I want to take, I'd like to take it on my smart phone. Is this too much to ask?

Evidently so: when I have my smart phone register to answer calls on the home line, incoming calls no longer ring the land-lines in the house. SIP is complex enough to make configuring softphones a nightmare; for all this complexity, it can't register two devices for the same phone line at the same time? Or is the limitation somewhere else?

p.s. If anyone knows how to solve this puzzle, I'd also like to forward caller ID to my phone as instant messages; I'm happy to write a little SIP to XMPP proxy in python, given the necessary clues about the protocol.

The HTML5 proposal does not attempt to correct the XSS problem and actually makes it worse... The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added.

It makes a lot of sense in theory, but I doubted the practicality of it in a Dec 2008 item:

after wrestling with the patchwork of javascript security policies in browsers in the past few weeks, the capability approach in adsafe looks simple and elegant by comparison. Is there any chance we can move the state-of-the-art that far? ... it seems an impossibly high bar to reach, given the worse-is-better tendency in software deployment...

He acknowledges the difficulty, to some extent:

HTML5 has a lot of momentum and appears to be doomed to succeed.

Chuckle.

He goes on to recommend to suspend the current HTML5 activity now:

I think the wiser course is to get it right first. We have learned the hard way that once an error gets into a web standard, it is really hard to get it out.

Would that standards had so much impact. It's true that once a W3C Working Group is in motion, it's difficult for the organization to decide to stop it. But that's really only tangentially related to the heart of the problem: shipping code. Much of the web development community and many of the users have their fingers on the shiny new features; who's going to go first in taking them away?

This item was supposed to be entitled Ditching cable for netflix/wii, broadcast HDTV, and a DIY PVR. After watching the digital media marketplace and technology for years, I convinced my family it was time to go for it this summer. We're close, but due to one critical breakdown in my research, we're not quite there.

Cancel TV part of double play TV+Internet subscription, reducing it by ~$60/month.

We never did go for their triple play with phone service; I signed up for VoIP with ViaTalk when we moved houses a couple years ago, and we've been pretty happy with it. While only the cable company can do on-screen caller-id, I'd rather have stuff like email and SMS notification for messages, for less money. Try it, and tell 'em Dan sent you (referral code 47340A17).
Check.

I wondered about the quality of streaming movies, and the first one we tried was pretty bad. We were planning to buy a Roku box, but first we tried it on my laptop, a MacBook Air, hooked up to the TV. Big mistake. Turns out these things have a well-known cooling problem, and "The problem is aggravated by system-intensive tasks such as video playback". Then we remembered Netflix started supporting streaming to Wii consoles, and we have one of those. It seemed too good to be true, but it's not. It's just like watching a DVD, as far as I can tell. We may or may not ever get a Roku.Check.

Cobble together a PVR out of old PC parts.

My wife misses some cable-network-only shows, but for the price of a new HD capture card (around $80) it looks like we should be able to timeshift broadcast favorites such as Survivor and Big Bang Theory.
That was the theory, anyway.

I thought the hard part was video capture, encoding, and recording. Sucking in HD video through a USB gizmo seemed too good to be true; plus, the norm with USB gizmos is that half the smarts is in a proprietary, Windows-only driver.

But most of the HD capture cards plug into a PCI express slot, and I think my machines are too old to have one of those. Hauppage linux support and the linuxtv wiki agreed that the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q was supported, and the Micro Center web site showed there were 2 in stock just down the road.

After just a bit of puzzling over the docs for Testing your DVB device, I figured out that I needed to tell the scanning tool to use the north america list of frequencies in order to build a channels.conf file. After that, I just followed my nose through getting it to work with mplayer, freevo, and eventually, mythtv.

All this was on my desktop machine. Now it was time to use this knowledge to get it running on an old klunker PC that I could put next to the TV downstairs. I shuffled some parts around between two old machines, plugged in the resulting frankenputer, and flipped the switch. Nothing. Maybe a short somewhere... disconnect the power supply from this and that and finally everything. Nope. She's dead, Jim.

While thinking about re-shuffling the parts, I realized I had an old mac mini in the closet, not doing much other than sharing music. MythTV on OS X said:

Frontend

To watch TV at acceptable speeds, you'll want at least an 800 MHz G4 or better.

Check... mine is a 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4.

And now a word from my technical reviewer:

If you've read this far, my 11 year old son, who reviewed this article for me, says you deserve a mini game:

I suppose MythTV on old hardware made sense a few years ago for standard-def or even DVD content, but upgrading one of these old boxes for HD playback doesn't seem to make much sense when a new, quieter, low-power machine with native HDMI out like the Acer AspireRevo goes for around $350.

That's just six months of saving $60/month that we were paying the cable company for TV.

Looxcie wearable continuous camcorder: the future is falling on my head

I've been telling people about this idea for years: a camera that you just wear all the time--part of your glasses, say--and then when you see something cool--like the three deer that crossed the road as I was driving my boys to school this morning, you just hit a button to say "keep that!" or "send it to mom" or "post it to youtube".

Well, the future is here. I didn't even have to go looking for it. It just fell on my head (well, in my inbox) a few minutes after I was searching for some gizmo or other.

It's a souped-up bluetooth headset rather than souped-up glasses. Where I imagined keeping the last 15 minutes or so, this thing keeps 5 hours of recent history, and 4 hours of saved video. And it integrates with smartphones for sharing. But the "Instant Clip" button is the exact feature I had in mind:

Looxcie Hands-Free Camcorder

Wearable camcorder continuously videos everything you see

Instant Clip button lets you retroactively save 30-second clips

Review and edit video using your compatible smartphone

Share video instantly via Facebook, YouTube, or email

Automatically stores up to five hours of footage

I just drained the piggy-bank on a Samsung Vibrant Android Phone, so I won't be an early adopter on this one. But I hope to stay tuned for reviews and I look forward to the day when they're available on craigslist or ebay.

p.s.

I wonder how many patents are involved in this thing. I can't believe I didn't publish the idea before this hit my inbox. I spent over a decade mentoring staff at W3C to publish early and often, and I formed good habits as far as getting any code I write out on the public Internet, but not so with blog items, yet. Live and learn.